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We're having a couple of days of rest. We were frozen for so long, it will take a couple of days until we are fully thawed. Last night was a good night's rest in a normal hotel - Homewood Suites by Hilton - Thanks Maureen! This morning it was already in the 70's when we got out to the bike and it quickly rose to the mid to upper 80's, a typical Florida fall day. We rode into Lowell, and spent most of the morning just wandering around through some of my old neighborhoods. We visited Burnside St where I grew up, St Margaret's Church and St Margaret's School where I went to church and school as a child. We also went by my first apartment and over to B St and our first house.
In some ways, Lowell has changed a lot since I left back in the late 80's. It's built up in many places where there used to be vacant lots. The names have changed on many of the businesses, but surprisingly, many are still the same as they were when I was a child. Riding up Burnside St, the hill didn't seem quite as steep as
it was when I was sledding down in the winter. And the streets seemed to have many more potholes than I ever remembered. Downtown Lowell now has traffic in both directions on Merrimack St, something I will probably never get used to seeing. But it was still Lowell. The character of the city hasn't changed that much. It's still a blue collar mill city, with people who worked hard, loved the Red Sox and raised their families.
For lunch, we stopped at Elliot's Hot Dogs. They still have the best hot dogs anywhere! Lowell is a National Historical Park, and we did the tourist thing by heading downtown to the Boott Mill Museum to see the looms in action as they were when my grandfather and great-grandfather worked there. We had seen the looms before when we visited several years back, but this time they were actually running. The belts were turning and the looms were clacking and even with just a few machines in operation, it was loud. I can't imagine how loud it must have been with multiple floors of looms in operation. It must have been deafening! This time there was an operator available who explained
how the looms worked, how the flying shuttle worked and how the automatic bobbin replacement revolutionized the industry.
Since my grandfather graduated from Lowell Textile College, I understood his job was to program the looms for making patterned cloth. The operator showed us all about how to program the looms and what some of the resulting patterns looked like. It was all done by inserting a series on pins into strips of wood around a cylinder. These would actuate levers that moved groups of threads and caused the pattern. It was both simpler and much more complicated than I had imagined. I wish I had asked my grandfather more about what he had done for a living.
After touring around town for a while, we decided to head back over to the hotel to relax and catch up on some laundry. Actually for me to relax, and Jody to catch up on some laundry. We finished just in time to head up to Manchester to have dinner to have dinner with Ed and Judy and their daughter Laura. Ed and I have known each other since Burnside St, all the way from Pine St School, through St Margaret's
School, through Keith Academy, and finally to Lowell Tech, where he went on to graduate, and I went on to the Air Force, eventually. Dinner was great, a nice Italian place in downtown Manchester.
Tomorrow is probably another day of rest, with maybe a little more touring around Lowell. This time we will remember to take our National Park Passports with us as we noticed that the Boott Mill Museum had passport stamps and we had forgotten our passports back at the hotel. We will need to make a quick visit.
84.4 Miles Today
6185.3 Miles Total
0.0 Gallons Today
151.680 Gallons Total
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